Solar collector systems are generally characterized by having large surface areas to collect solar radiation. The large collecting surface area is usually made up of a group of sub-components connected together and supported to create the larger surface area. Collector systems are designed to either directly collect the sun's electromagnetic energy, such as photovoltaic array systems, or to reflect the energy to a receiving element, such as with heliostats or parabolic concentrators. To improve the efficiency of these systems, many solar collectors track with the sun. These systems either directly track to the sun, such as a solar parabolic dish concentrator which must face the sun, or these systems follow a different path in order to reflect the electromagnetic radiation to a particular location, such as a heliostat. Tracking usually requires the collector system have two rotational degrees of freedom, e.g. altitude and azimuth.
From a design perspective, one of the most critical features of solar collector systems is to have a large surface area for the collector. However, when exposed to environmental elements, these large surface areas create many design problems. Of particular importance are the loads imposed upon the structure due to extreme weather, primarily high winds. To accommodate these high-wind loads, large and heavy structures are incorporated into the design to support the solar elements. A common design for a prior art solar collector system 15 is shown in FIG. 1. System 15 consists of a base or mounting pedestal 16 upon which the remaining components are mounted. These components include a drive system 17, support elements 18 upon which individual solar components 19 are mounted, and the individual collecting or reflecting solar components.
While this prior art has been around for decades, to date these systems have been very heavy and expensive to manufacture and install. Their cost and bulkiness has limited their widespread use and acceptance for solar collector systems. The first problem is that these systems contain heavy structural elements to support and stabilize the system in high winds, which contributes to the overall initial high cost of implementing a system. The second problem is that the drive system and other auxiliary components must also be large and powerful to effectively deal with the weight and inertia of the bulky system. The associated large and powerful motors make it difficult to provide fine positional control and motion of the entire structure.
Accordingly, there remains a continuing need to provide solar collector systems which are light weight, stable, easy to manufacture, simple to assemble, inexpensive and can withstand high winds.